Authoritative Practices and Collective Validation: Wikidata within the Collaborative Digital Edition of the Greek Anthology

Maxime Guénette

Université de Montréal

Mathilde Verstraete

Université de Montréal

May 6, 2025

Introduction

  • Wikidata as a tool in the DH community
  • Decentralisation of authority

How, then, can expert-led projects work with a generalist platform such as Wikidata to generate new forms of knowledge?

How do these hybrid models — which combine scholarly expertise with public participation — challenge traditional boundaries between academic and amateur contributors, and between knowledge production and validation?

Overview

  • Integration of Wikidata in DH projects
  • The digital and collaborative edition of the Greek Anthology : corpus, platforms, current uses of Wikidata
  • Case Study : the authors of the Greek Anthology
  • Some thoughts on authority and collective intelligence : digital infrastructures challenging and extending traditional scholarly practices.

Wikidata and Digital Humanities

  • Wikidata is a major knowledge graph for structuring and sharing data
  • DH projects use it to publish Linked Open Data without technical barriers
  • GLAM institutions rely on it for metadata curation and interoperability

Wikidata as A Linking Hub

Authority on Digital Platforms

A collaborative and digital edition of the Greek Anthology

  • Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities
  • Fundings (SSHRC) ;
    • Insight Development (2017-2019)
    • Insight (2019-2025)
    • 2 Connections (2022, 2024)
  • Large team :
    • Main researchers : M. Vitali-Rosati, E. Bouchard, C. Raschle
    • Coordinator : M. Verstraete, W. Bouchard
    • Technical development : D. Larlet, S. Rubio, É. Guicherd
    • Editors : L. Capelo, M. Guénette, É. Bernaer, …
    • Partners : CRIHN, GREN, Perseus, Perseids, Heidelberg’s Library, Liceo classico S. di Cagnazzi (Bari), University of Naples, …
    • Many collaborators …

Project’s corpus

  • Collection of ancient Greek epigrammatic poetry
  • Classical to Byzantine periods (= 15 centuries of epigrammatics)
  • < successive compilations
  • Open corpus:
    • AG = Palatine Anthology1 + Appendix Planudea2
    • According to our API, 4,134 epigrams, by 311 authors

Project’s goals

  • A hub for the Greek Anthology : Manuscript, Texts (in many languages), Keywords, Comments,…

A few words on the previous platforms

  • Experimentation is part of the project
  • Corpus : fragmentary and complex transmission
  • Different platforms:
    • SPIP

    • Designing a digital edition involves more than providing access to texts (Sahle 2016)

    • Anthologia Palatina (allowed collaboration)
    • Anthologia graeca (collaboration, API, multilingual support)

The platform’s keywords

CSV :

  • Author’s ID on our platform
  • Wikidata’s ID & URL
  • TLG’s ID & URL
  • Languages (latin, french, english, italian, ancient greek)
  • Action (Nothing, Delete, Create) to do on our platform

Some comments on the outcome and future work

Authors : Go further ? (floruit ?)

Cities : work in progress

  • ✅ Coordinates
  • ❌ Names in different languages

Other keywords : work in progress

Conclusion

  • Wikidata redefines academic authority through shared, community-driven knowledge.

  • It challenges scholars to balance openness with academic standards.

  • It surfaces tensions around validation and authorship in collaborative research.